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(8)Mega Man vs (7)Pikachu (Legends Bracket) 2018
Ulti's Analysis This was SUCH a good match, and it reminded me a lot of Mega Man v Zero v Charizard back in 2003sic. Mega Man had every reason in the world to just roll over and die in this match, but the little guy just has the clutch gene and refuses to quit in close matches, even when a lot of people on Board 8 were sitting there expecting Pikachu to just roll this dude. Pikachu stomped through the main bracket, and outside of Smash Bros Mega Man hasn't done much lately. No, MM9 through 11 doesn't count. Dude's really something. When this match started, it didn't exactly look like we were getting some great classic. Pikachu held strong early, but then Mega Man had a 100 vote lead in 15 minutes. It looked to be one of those standard matches that looks close on percents, but is never actually close. But then Pikachu won the next update by 26, and it was on. Pikachu got this thing back under 50 very quickly, but then Mega Man started going up again and built a lead of 200. Not to be outdone, Pikachu countered again and in only a few updates it was below 100 again. We continued on the two steps forward one step back routine for Mega Man until he built his biggest lead of the match: 237 votes. Remember that number. After some stalling and as we continued on through midnight, Pikachu slowly but surely fought his way back into things. Remember a few matches ago where I joked about Mega Man going to every house in Europe and killing a house pet, a first born son, and torching the place? Europe despises this dude, and it shows up every time Mega Man has a match. We don't usually notice because most matches with these characters aren't close, but in matches like this it really matters. Pikachu tied this poll at 3 am, and then veeeeeery slowly started building a lead. He hit 100 in time for the morning vote, where one would assume a Pokemon would take over. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8d/8d/8a/8d8d8a90b54f883fc446f52425e22f4a.jpg Mega Man won the morning vote, and in only a couple hours we were tied again. Did Mega Man take advantage and start climbing? Of course not, because these two guys were out there giving us the best match of this contest to this point. King Dedede and Revolver Ocelot having a match like this is great, but Mega Man and Pikachu doing it actually meant something. But despite all the back and forth, Mega Man slowly trended up all morning and well past lunch en route to a lead of 150 votes. But you can't have classic matches if someone just dies, so once again Pikachu fought back. During the afternoon and largely thanks to the ASV (after school vote, for those playing the home game), Pikachu erased that 150 vote lead and yet again we were tied up. At 5 pm, with only two hours left in the poll, these two were dead even. It was going to come down to which fanbase wanted it more, and for once, the Pokemon fans actually bothered caring about a close match. I've been asking these people to try showing up for years. Today, they finally did it. Pikachu built up a 100 vote lead over the next 45 minutes, and though Mega Man fought like hell to get back in the match, he simply ran out of time. Pikachu was ready for that last push, went 'oh hey the guy I'm against is made of metal, maybe I should electrocute the little bastard', and that was all she wrote. Pikachu wins by 62, in our first true loss for the Noble Nine. More on that in a second. Remember when I said to remember the number 237? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S53fZTbKHG0 A new wire to wire record! I'm a sucker for that list, and seeing such a great match set a record like that warms my heart. Props to these two for giving us one hell of a show, and props to Pikachu for finally breaking the Noble Nine. Ah yes, the Noble Nine. Link, Cloud, Mario, Samus, Crono, Solid Snake, Sephiroth, Mega Man, and Sonic the Hedgehog. Nine characters so much stronger than everyone else that they could only lose to each other. Nine characters who have had entire contests warped around them so others have a fair chance of winning. Whenever something happens that proves the LOL x stats wrong, I'm the first guy to laugh. You all know this. I go the other way with the Noble Nine. Sort of. I'm the kind of guy to make excuses whenever they lose in some weird bracket idea like 4ways, 3ways, and Rivalry Rumble, simply because the whole reason those formats happened was to give other characters a chance of winning. The only losses they've had I consider truly legitimate are 1v1 24 hour losses. I don't care that Crono lost to Vincent in 2007. That was a 4way poll. I don't care that Kirby overperforms in 4way polls and beat Sonic. I don't care that Missingno got a 12 hour day match against Crono with backwards trends. I sure as hell don't care about 3way polls, because anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows why those were stupid. That said, the mental gymnastics I saw after this match were really, really dumb. There are people claiming this "doesn't count" because Pikachu only won with the registered user bonus. There are people claiming this "doesn't count" because Mega Man won the rematch. There are people claiming this "doesn't count" because this sent Mega Man to a loser's bracket instead of actually eliminating him from the tournament. How about you people stop moving goalposts with your mental gymnastics and fuck off? Mega Man lost, fair and square. Deal with it. Mega Man losing here meant this was the first time, ever, that a Noble Nine character lost in a 1v1 24 hour match to someone from outside the group. That is a big deal and the push to cheapen this win so that Tifa or Zelda can take credit instead is an embarrassment. Pikachu is the character that broke the Noble Nine. Period. He did so in a really good match, too. Safer777's Analysis This is it. This is maybe the most important match in contest history. For the first time ever a non NN'er beats a NN'er in a 24 hour match, with no rallies and no stupid things. Damn. And the one that did it? Pikachu. The guy who barely break 55% on Parappa on the first contest! Man how much he has risen! Obviously MM was always strong. He is a NN'er after all. Of course in the last years he has fallen and he even was considered the weakest NN'er too. Guess he is? Doubt it. Pikachu is just a monster. A pocket monster! Yeah I am stupid I know. Still this match was the best of the contest so far no doubt. Also this is one of the closest wire to wire matches ever. Don't know in which position but it is. Anyways at the start MM was winning of course. He managed to get to 237 lead which was the highest for both characters and then Pika started cutting. This started happening after around 5 hours. So after almost 4 hours of Pika cutting he managed to get ahead finally. Then he started getting a lead. Managed to go to around 110. Then MM started cutting and he went ahead too. And then he started building a lead. He went to 150 and then Pika started cutting again. Then Pika went ahead with like less than 2 hours left in the match. And MM started stalling and cutting but he wasn't able to do it at the end. In the end Pika won with around 62 votes. What a match! Now of course people will say that MM won with the resistered voters and that is true. MM also won in USA too. And that is true too. But let's be real. He just lost. And that is. Still he went out with a fight. Of course the term NN'er will not die. There is currently a topic that details the matches from NN'ers. Seriously even if we count ALL the matches ever, including multiways they have like 95% victories too! That is impressive. Still as a fan of Pokemon I like this result. So there you go. Pika got revenge for Charizard for 2013 too! Pokemon man. I still don't get why they are so strong though. And I am a fan too! Still this match will always be remembered. Of course the prediction percentage was under 20% which makes sense. I mean almost all Gurus too had MM advancing here too. Tsunami's Analysis This was definitely one of the more interesting matches of the contest, because it was the first time that a Noble Niner had outright lost a 24-hour 1v1 match against a non-Noble Niner--though just like when they lost in fourways and threeways and 12-hour matches against weird glitch characters, there was plenty of room for the Noble Nine apologists to spin this one, chief among them the fact that Mega Man won the raw vote and only lost because of the registered user bonus, though technically there was also something about two matches going on at once (though since the other match in this particular case was Link vs. Ganondorf, I doubt it . The stats topics blamed this on the fact that this match was coming right out of the Thanksgiving break, that casuals might not have known to come back while the contest diehards--which is to say, us--were ready to come out supporting our horses, or rats as the case may be. And Board 8 has been fans of Pokémon for quite some time now. There's almost always a Pokémon ranking topic or a Save My Pokémon or something floating around this board, and they can last quite some time because there's over 800 of them already with that number only set to rise by the end of the year with Sword and Shield coming out. (And what a time, too--Pokémon has a strong nostalgia factor, such that each new generation seems to make the fanbase like earlier generations even more. So while they'd still be a dark horse to win it all--though barring rallies, the same could be said of almost any game not named "Breath of the Wild"--the fact that Gen VIII will already be out makes me think that the Gen V games could be stronger than expected in GotD next year). Mega Man, on the other hand...well, okay, the classic Mega Man games get some love here, too. I remember buying Mega Man 2 on Wii VC after it was voted Board 8's Game of the Year for my birth year of 1989. (I...never quite got the hang of it. Maybe I should give it another try, seeing as how I'm apparently into platformers now.) And the classic Mega Man series is, amazingly enough, the most "active" at the moment. But Mega Man is always going to suffer from mismanagement--both the fact that the early games never made it to the PAL regions and the fact that it's a series made by Capcom, which is not a good thing to be in this decade. Board 8's favorite series is made by Capcom and I still doubt many people on this board would defend the company itself. So this was an upset ripe to happen. My Oracle pick was initially far more bullish, but that was pure fanboyism/salt about Mega Man > Charizard being the match to officially eliminate me from the Guru in 2013 (though seeing as how I was banking on Samus and Mario splitting with each other enough for Charizard to get past them, I was probably dead as soon as Vivi upset Mario, and if not then, the very next match when Squall held off Missingno's upset bid to allow an easy path for Red to be the one in Mario's place.) I backed down on the prediction of Pikachu winning easily, but couldn't bring myself to pick against him. I'd like to say that I had some great insight, but honestly, I think I just got lucky here. Mega Man is, at least marginally, still stronger than Pikachu, and proved it later in this contest, but Pikachu caught the perfect circumstances for the upset and capitalized, and I got my best Oracle ever, just 0.01% off of perfect. And of course, there's the question of "is this the match that truly 'broke' the Noble Nine?" To which I say, no, it isn't. L-Block's run in 2007 and Vincent beating him to the punch with the win over Crono is cool, and 2013's format was just weirdness and shouldn't be taken too seriously. But again I should mention that Mega Man won the raw vote. It's hard for me to say that "certain votes count more than others and also there's another match going on at the same time" is less of a gimmick than "only 12 hours long instead of 24". So while I personally say that Missingno was the one to break it, I certainly don't think that if that doesn't count, this one should. But maybe that's Board 8's fanboyism again (even though Missingno's Gen I as well!)--63.55% of Second Chance brackets got this one right, even though less than 20% of main brackets did. Not that it matters because it would be all of two days until a completely unambiguous Noble Nine break, and if the two polls in one day was still too much gimmick for you, that'd be fixed by contest's end as well. Category:2018 Contest Matches